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VIA Fails With KMS/3D, But Has Yet Another X Driver

12-17-2010, 08:30 PM

Phoronix: VIA Fails With KMS/3D, But Has Yet Another X Driver

One year ago VIA came out with their Linux TODO list, which was disappointing. This list had a VIA TTM/GEM memory manager module for Q2'2010, a kernel mode-setting driver in the works for H2'2010, and a Gallium3D driver in-development for Q4'2010. Even meeting this TODO list would be bad as the support most Linux customers are after (3D and KMS to a lesser extent) would not be arriving until three years after VIA announced this newest Linux strategy. But, VIA has failed miserably in accomplishing any of these mile-stones for KMS and open-source 3D acceleration support. Though resulting in VIA's Linux community being fragmented even more, new VIA X.Org (DDX) drivers seem to keep popping up. If there wasn't already enough of these not-fully-working and rarely-touched open-source drivers, another VIA Chrome X.Org driver has been started recently that's a fork of another open-source VIA driver...

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On desktop systems the bad via driver support does not hurt that extreme as you could add a dedicated card but for laptop users thats too bad currently. Most drivers are so stupid that you have to force h/v sync, screen res + display size even when they "work". It must be impossible for via to support they onboard solutions with kms with correct edid frequencies. I do not even speak of 3d...

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This is not entirely VIA. This is Jon Nettleton, one of the least useful and the most noisy of the openchrome forkers. Also one of the people who was very keen to join in the "we love VIA for finally claiming they will work with open source, after more than 5 years of others trying to push there and after RadeonHD freeing ATI"-frenzy at openchrome.

I won't even bother to look into the commits, but the fact that the commits were made by root, makes the whole thing rather questionable, even from this very superficial pov.

Another Dodo.

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On desktop systems the bad via driver support does not hurt that extreme as you could add a dedicated card but for laptop users thats too bad currently. Most drivers are so stupid that you have to force h/v sync, screen res + display size even when they "work". It must be impossible for via to support they onboard solutions with kms with correct edid frequencies. I do not even speak of 3d...

Heh, my unichrome driver was the very first to do free modesetting. This was not what the openchrome people liked though (and also not what people like keithp and others liked).

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Considering there are some docs already out, why not set a GSoC target for Via KMS?

It would very likely be working before anything appears from Via...

The docs are bare register info, my unichrome code is the real source of info for writing suitable modesetting code.

And i personally find that GSoC results are usually overrated (everyone talks about it solving so many problems, in future, but no one really goes and evaluates such things publically; no-one compares up front expectations with actual results), and a proper modesetting driver is way too much work for GSoC anyway. VIA hw is not glint.

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The docs are bare register info, my unichrome code is the real source of info for writing suitable modesetting code.

And i personally find that GSoC results are usually overrated (everyone talks about it solving so many problems, in future, but no one really goes and evaluates such things publically; no-one compares up front expectations with actual results), and a proper modesetting driver is way too much work for GSoC anyway. VIA hw is not glint.

Would it still be too much work, if you consider it could be a port from your unichrome code?